This is the story of the most successful—and least known—whistleblower operation of all time. Four men who have made a vast fortune blowing the whistle on the drug industry, forcing Big Pharma to pay the federal government over a billion dollars in settlements.

The SEC has chosen a former Altria and AOL executive to head its new Whistleblower Office, the commission said Friday. Sean McKessy will wield the new power given to the SEC under the Dodd-Frank law passed last year.

Wall Street is suddenly paying attention to the culture of whistleblowing, because the new Dodd-Frank financial reform law, for the first time, extends whistleblower provisions to Wall Street, meaning employees who expose fraud and wrongdoing stand to collect between 10 and 30 percent of the amount recovered by the government.

When President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act into law last summer, very few in the financial industry knew that the bill included a massive change in the way whistleblowing law works in this country.